Case study · Construction · AI
COSTRA
Turn a bill of quantities into a defensible bid — in minutes, not weeks.
The problem
Bids are won or lost
on the estimate.
Contractors price thousands of BOQ lines by hand, racing the tender clock across scattered spreadsheets. The result is slow, error-prone, and impossible to defend when a client asks how a number was reached.
Manual pricing
Estimators key in unit prices line by line — thousands of them — under a deadline that never moves.
Scattered rates
Material, labor and equipment rates live in old files nobody fully trusts or keeps current.
Thin margins
One mispriced section can flip a winning bid into a loss — with no clear audit trail behind it.
Core capabilities
Everything an estimate needs — in one place.
Fast Extraction
Reads any BOQ PDF and pulls out every line item.
Smart Classification
Auto-sorts lines into sections and the rate library.
Rate Library
Pre-loaded materials, labor and equipment by category.
Instant Pricing
Applies live rates to price a whole BOQ at once.
Bid Summary
Overhead, profit and contingency, computed live.
Technical Offer
Generates a submission-ready proposal document.
How it works
Upload once. Priced in minutes.
Upload
Drop in the tender's BOQ files — PDF, Excel, scans — in any layout.
Extract
AI classifies and pulls every line item, each with a confidence score you can check.
Price
Link items to your rate library and price the whole bill of quantities at once.
Submit
Get a live bid summary and a ready-to-send technical offer — fully defensible.
Product tour
A look inside COSTRA.
The differentiator
An estimate you can defend.
Speed only matters if the number holds up. COSTRA keeps a human in the loop and a trail behind every figure — so a fast bid is also a bid you can stand behind.
- Every extracted line carries a confidence score — nothing is a black box.
- Low-confidence rows are flagged for review before they reach the price.
- Each figure traces back to a rate in your library, not a guess.
- Overhead, profit and contingency are transparent and adjustable.
The impact